MacGuffin is a new and unusual design & crafts magazine. It features fabulous stories about the life of ordinary, often anonymously designed things. Each biannual edition takes an object and explores the manifold stories it generates. Like the MacGuffins in Hitchcock films, these things are not the main characters, but the plot devices that set the story in motion.

From December 4 to January 10, at Printed Matter in New York, Swiss artists Linus Bill and Adrien Horni will present an exhibition featuring a survey of their collaborative publications, as well as a newly-created wall piece. Stemming from their desire to challenge the perceived hierarchy of artistic mediums, their practice includes an active publishing element as well as sculptures and paintings that are often mutually-derived.Linus Bill and Adrien Horni often begin their work together with the creation of a modest publication. The small-scale collages that make up the piece are handmade with paper, scissors and glue, as well as on copy machines, scanners, and iPhones. These ‘reproductions’ serve as a catalog for a show that does not yet exist. The artists then select works to scale up and re-create as full size canvas “paintings”, fulfilling the obligation of the Artist but in reverse.
In the case of their installation at Printed Matter they have engaged a similar set of concerns, though from another vantage point. Following the creation of a new staple-bound zine catalog, they have simply excerpted an image from the publication as a laser print collage with an added sticker. By maintaining the work’s size and giving the image a new context (now in an enormous frame), they re-assign the value of artwork and make it into something that is at once both an exemplary example of a wall-worthy artwork, and that seems to undermine that suggestion at the same time. In a concurrent exhibition at Nathalie Karg Gallery (Opening December 11), the small scale collages from the publication (and the framed piece at Printed Matter) are installed as the “original“ large scale paintings.
An additional survey of publications by Turbo Magazine, Horni’s ongoing publishing project, will also be on view as part of the installation.

Aspen Magazine was a multimedia magazine conceived of, edited and published by Phyllis Johnson in New York from 1965 to 1971. Aspen broke new ground in terms of its editorial concept, design approach and distribution strategy, which continues to be resonant and influential today.

The magazine featured a diverse and impressive array of contributors, from such key artists, musicians, authors and theorists as Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, Ed Ruscha, J. G. Ballard, Bill Evans, Philip Glass, the Velvet Underground and Yoko Ono. Known as “the magazine in a box”, Aspen was made up of unbound contents that included texts, flexi-discs, reels of film and other objects. It struck a chord in the 1960s artists’ publishing culture—which included publications by Marcel Duchamp, Seth Siegelaub and members of the Fluxus movement—and embraced the idea of presenting travelling exhibitions in a book (or a box, for that matter) in order to provide alternative spaces and economies for art.

The exhibition Aspen Magazine: 1965–1971, from November 26 to February 8 2015, at Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, features complete sets of all issues, with a focus on the combined edition of issues five and six from 1967, which was guest-edited by Brian O’Doherty and is referred to as The Conceptual Issue. Contributors to this issue include Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, Dan Graham, George Kubler, Robert Morris, William S. Burroughs, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Morton Feldman, Michel Butor, Tony Smith and Merce Cunningham. Barthes first published his influential and important essay The Death of the Author in this issue.

Offprint Paris, November 14-16, 2014, Beaux-arts de Paris, is an art-publishing fair featuring discerning publishers on art, photography, design and experimental music labels. This year’s edition showcases more than 130 publishers, from over 20 countries (all participants now announced on the website), selected by Yannick Bouillis, Charlotte Cheetham and Maxime Guitton.

Pie Paper is a non periodical publication which has been designed to inspire, entertain and inform. Pie Paper #5 is titled “The food issue”. Our connections to food are multifarious and complex, with many of our ideas about food taken for granted. Why for instance are we happy to drink the milk of a cow, but shy away at the thought of nibbling on human cheese? What compels us to eat potato chips instead of nutritionally superior deep fried cockroaches? And why do some people prefer mouthfuls of wet clay and metal over real food? … Among others in this issue, the Italian Futurists could help you to broaden your horizon, Buckminster Fuller explains the smart way to play with your food, Werner Herzog will show you how to boil your boot, and the Whole Roasted Camel could keep you and your family fed for a while.

Despite the impression given by its format and density, the central dossier of the bilingual Azimuts 40-41 – Design Research Journals. A Panorama has a quite modest objective: the provision of an initial survey of journals devoted to design research. Rather than approaching design research frontally, the editorial team has investigated one of the modes of expression favoured by research: the periodical, the supposed paragon and yardstick of academic excellence. However, as could be expected, this castling alone were insufficient to avoid all danger; fundamental issues concerning research made a rapid return to the surface. What place should be given to theory in an activity in which practice predominates in fact and by rights? Why in the field of research should writing replace actual practice? Can design research be solely descriptive or meta-descriptive and thus be reduced to a more or less scholarly commentary of practice? This led to the question: why should design research adopt the paradigm of scientific discourse when design can also be considered as being an artistic, technical, political, ethical or critical project?

From May 1979 to January of 1987, the East Village Eye, a monthly magazine of popular and avant garde culture, exerted a profound influence that eventually reached across the entire world.
Coverage in the Eye resulted in development of several key “scenes” that eventually evolved into movements felt all over the planet. Some credit the Eye with creating the East Village art scene, which nurtured legendary talents such as Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz, while the Eye’s coverage of other emerging New York artists such as Sue Coe, Barbara Kruger and Kiki Smith helped illuminate the psychosocial conflicts running through the contemporary brain. Many such artists made work specifically for publication in the Eye.
When hip hop started to emerge from the ghettoes of New York, the Eye was there with early stories on historical figures like Afrikaa Bambaataa, Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000, Run DMC, the Rock Steady Crew and many others. How early? The East Village Eye was the first publication ever to print the words “hip hop”.

The mini-symposium entitled “How Hip Hop Came Downtown”, September 18 from 6pm atPrinted Matter in New York, will cover the process in which members of New York’s media and fine art communities brought rap music, graffiti art and breakdancing from the inner-city ghettos to a wider audience that has since spread across the world. Leading this discussion will be Eye publisher/editor Leonard Abrams, scholar Yazmin Ramirez, musician and multimedia artist Michael Holman, and the celebrated artist and media figure Fab 5 Freddy. Plus special guest appearances!

September 26–28, 2014, Printed Matter presents the ninth annual NY Art Book Fair, at MoMA PS1, New York. Free and open to the public, the NY Art Book Fair is the world’s premier event for artists’ books, catalogs, monographs, periodicals, and zines. Last year, the fair featured nearly 300 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-six countries. NYABF14 is also full of programming and special events.

V. Vale is an editor, writer-interviewer, historian, photographer and pianist. As publisher-editor of the 1977-79 zine SEARCH & DESTROY, V. Vale helped bring international attention to a Punk scene as prophetic as more publicized ones elsewhere. The publication was launched with $100 each from Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and published at City Lights Bookstore, where Vale worked at the time. For Vale, Punk provided a launching pad for a host of cultural-anthropological explorations, including Industrial music, the writings of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, feminism, pranksterism, studies of The Body, plus “Incredibly Strange” filmmaking and music, which he has chronicled with the RE/SEARCH series of publications that he founded in 1980.

Now lauded as an invaluable document of early punk and a graphic design rule-breaker (“We’d do a layout meeting: ‘Here’s the text. Here are the pictures. Your job is to make this interview as rad as you can’”), Search and Destroy also became a way for Vale to make critical connections between the work and thoughts generated by punk groups and those formulated by artists in other media, as interviews with Vale’s mentors Ballard and Burroughs made their way into the zine.
The RE/Search series had become the equivalent of an ever-unfolding countercultural bible: essential reading not only for Punks — all the books, Vale swears, are informed by that Revolution — but artists, musicians, cultural fire-starters, and trouble-makers of every nonconformist stripe. In turn, Vale built a bridge with his paperbacks between the cultural movers around him and the world of books that has succored him. “I learned long ago that reading is not a passive process,” says Vale. “I like to mark up my books. My books are heavily interacted with. I look at books not as books, but as conversations.”

From September 6 to 13, V. Vale will be doing a mini-lecture/workshop tour in Belgium and Holland. September 6, at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp, Vale will unearth a rare complete set of Search & Destroy—the 11-issue punk zine about underground literary and music culture Vale produced from 1977 to 1979. Then, at 8pm, Vale will talk about how seed money from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg led to Search & Destroy, how that led to RE/Search Magazine, and how all of it led to RE/Search Publications. More about the tour here.

In its piece called Digital Video Effect: “Spills”, Seth Price borrowed some home video footage shot by Joan Jonas around 1971, featuring Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt and Jonas herself, talking with dealer Joe Hellman.
Price subjected the archival material to an invented digital video effect that made the footage appear to alternately spill across the black video screen and then itself be entirely obscured by oozing blackness. Displayed on a new TV/DVD player still in its own cardboard packaging, the work was like an object you could trip over, or look down on. It is a piece about the archive and the artwork, about concealment and visibility, as well as the liquidity of both digital culture and historical material.

Peep-Hole Sheet is a quarterly of writings by artists. Each issue is dedicated solely to one artist, who is invited to contribute with an unpublished text whose content is completely free in terms both of subject and format. The texts are published in their original language, with accompanying translations in English. Peep-Hole Sheet is meant for those who believe artists are catalysts for ideas all around us, and who want to read their words without any filter. Over time it aspires to build up an anthology of writings that might open new perspectives for interpreting and understanding our times.

Peep-Hole Sheet Issue #21, Ok, Just Send Me the Bill, by Seth Price, is a “fictionalized adaptation” taken from the audio of Price’s work. It was written in the same year, and laid it out so as to resemble an old book, with stills from the video as illustrations. Price altered the conversation, framing it within a kind of minimalist American style of fiction writing, together with oddball excurses and ‘glitches.’ Published here in its original format, the piece is a reflection on artworks and market and the passing of time that creates a temporal short-circuit, very much speaking to our moment, and questioning the role of the artist at play.

Flaneur presents one street per issue. The magazine embraces the street’s complexity, its layers and fragmented nature with a literary approach. It creates a meaningful correlation between places, stories, people and objects that aren’t necessarily related. The magazine is aware of its subjectivity. It wants to say: “This could be Georg-Schwarz-Straße”.
Flaneur issue 3, Rue Bernard, Montreal, will be launched June 27, from 6pm, in Berlin, and July 4, from 6pm, in Montreal.

During its fifty-four issue run, spanning nearly three decades, ARK was an influential presence in British cultural life. A magazine created by students at the Royal College of Art in London, ARK attracted international attention for its often bold and fast-changing design as well as the extraordinary cast of writers and artists who contributed to its pages, including Ralph Rumney, Lucio Fontana, Alison and Peter Smithson, Toni del Renzio and Reyner Banham, as well as college students and staff.

Ixiptla is a new biannual journal, initiated by the artist Mariana Castillo Deball, about trajectories of Anthropology.

The Nahua concept of ixiptla derives from the particle xip, meaning “skin”, coverage or shell. A natural outer layer of tissue that covers the body of a person or animal, the skin can be separated from the body to produce garments, containers for holding liquids or parchment as a writing surface.
Originally a Nahua word, ixiptla has been understood as image, delegate, character, and representative. Ixiptla could be a container, but also could be the actualization of power infused into an object or person. In Nahua culture, it took the form of a statue, a vision, or a victim who turned into a god destined to be sacrificed. Without having to visually appear the same, multiple ixiptlas of the same god could exist simultaneously. The distinction between essence and material, and between original and copy vanishes.

This edition of Ixiptla is focused on the trajectory of objects collected and produced by archeologists – plaster molds, facsimiles, drawings, photographs, and scale models -, in an attempt to capture and replicate material evidences left by time; these objects emerge from a specific moment in time, producing a doppelgänger of the original milieu, which then takes its own course. For this first issue, a group of anthropologists, archaeologists, artists, and writers have been invited to reflect on the role of the model, the copy, and reproduction in their areas of research and practice.

The Exhibitionist is as a journal by curators, for curators, in which the most pertinent questions on exhibition making today would be considered and assessed. Modeled after the iconic French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, the journal is meant to serve a critical role in understanding current curatorial practices through a number of editorial formats focused specifically on the critical and historical importance of exhibitions.The Exhibitionist #9, featuring Christopher Lee on the cover, introduces, among others, a new long-form section titled “Rigorous Research”; for this first installment, Italian curator and writer Germano Celant addresses the evolution of exhibition spaces in the 19th and 20th centuries, and certain seminal exhibitions that established new standards by reacting to the existing models of design and display.

Apartamento is an everyday life interiors magazine. A place in print about people, not just objects. Apartamento features the homes and lives of creative people, both established and emerging, from all over the world. It understands interior design as a means of personal expression, showing how people arrange their homes and the solutions they find to the same problems that everyone has. Apartamento puts forward a fresh and simply crafted aesthetic. It cares about the way people live and their relationships to the places they live.Apartamento issue #13 features Wes Anderson, Anissa Helou, Joel Chen, Rafael Horzon, Jack Pierson, Faye Toogood, Marie Honda, Richard McConkey, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Adel Husni Bey & Mirella Clemencigh, Arturo Rhodes, Fabiola Alondra, Bernhard Willhelm, Andy Rementer & Margherita Urbani, Oscar Tusquets Blanca, Peter Shire. With The Girards, a special supplement about the legacy of Alexander Girard & Humor Furniture Graphic a portfolio by Luciano Consigli.

The Travel Almanac is a Berlin- and New York- based print publication focusing on traveling & temporary habitation, addressing an increasingly mobilized creative community, it is the first publication of its kind to speak to this sophisticated generation of travelers.
Contributors for The Travel Almanac Issue no. 7 are Gia Coppola, Ryan McGinley, Christophe Lemaire, David Chipperfield, Cordula Reyer, Phil Collins.

TOO MUCH gathers thoughts about cities, the people who live in them, and the changes affecting our society and our environment. It’s a magazine about romantic geography.TOO MUCH Issue 5 is about looking at the body in space, and ways in which we have biologically and socially entered into the built environment, and how we are then changed into the process. With contributions by Francis Upritchard, Hidemasa Yatabe, Manabe Daito, Cara Phillips, Naoki Ishikawa, Shinya Aota, Madeline Gins, Ari Marcopoulos, Fala, Yayako Uchida, Takashi Homma, Fumihiko Maki, Arata Isozaki, Hiroshi Hara, Kengo Kuma and Nagao Nishikawa.

May is a bilingual (French/English) quarterly publication conceived as an experimental platform for new forms of criticism. May proposes to examine matters pertaining to the field of contemporary cultural production through the publication of essays, exhibition reviews and interviews with international contributors varying from scholars to critics, artists, writers and curators.May n° 12 is the third and final section devoted to the 1990s in France, with contributions by Georges Rey, Florence Bonnefous, Éric Troncy, Yves Aupetitallot, Elein Fleiss, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Bernard Joisten, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Olivier Zahm, Nicolas Bourriaud, Renaud Jerez, Roy Genty, Annie Godfrey Larmon, Nick Mauss, Neil Beloufa, Jacob King, Vincent Normand, Damon Sfetsios, Elise Duryee-Browner, Jana Euler.